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Friday, April 19, 2013

With an
unconscious assassin lying on his bedroom floor, Fan Xian didn’t have any time
for questions, so he said in a straight forward manner.

“Someone came to
kill me. I knocked him unconscious, and he is still lying on the floor.”

The blind
youngster turned his head slightly sideway. Although his heart skipped a beat,
he didn’t show any expression on his face. He lowered his head in a salute.

“What is Young Master Fan joking about?”

“There’s no time for playing serenity right now.
You have to take care of me.”

With a broad grin, Fan Xian grabbed hold of
the blind youngster’s hand and started pulling him toward the Count’s Manor,
thinking to himself, “Still pretending that you don’t know me? Whatever! Not
right now. Let’s go!”

“The Young Master is still talking
nonsense.”

The blind youngster knitted his brow slightly
as though he was baffled by how the little kid could have known his
relationship to the kid – at the time when he had delivered Fan Xian to Port
Danzhou in a swaddle, Fan Xian had only been a few months old, and shouldn’t
have remembered anything about it – Could the Old Madame at the Count’s Manor
have told Fan Xian about him?

It was very late. The night was silent with
only a few occasional shrill dog barks toward people getting into the wrong
house after late bathroom runs.

The blind youngster Five-Bamboo finally
moved. With the still blank and apathetic face, he shut the door of the grocery
store and began walking toward the Count’s Manor. Fan Xian let out a big sigh
of relief and then quickly followed behind in small steps.

When the two arrived at the Count’s Manor,
they went inside through the dog hole. Once they were inside Fan Xian’s
bedroom, the blind youngster “looked” at the still unconscious assassin on the
floor.

Fan Xian stared at the man on the floor
nervously, not knowing whether the man was dead or alive. So he turned around
and asked.

“Uncle Five-Bamboo, why didn’t you come to
see me in the last several years and always kept yourself inside the grocery
store?”

The blind youngster named Five-Bamboo turned
his head slightly sideways once again and only spoke after a long pause.

“My Young Lord,
you really surprise me.”

He was indeed
caught by surprise. Although he had expected the kid to be naturally out of the
ordinary since he carried the bloodline of Her Ladyship, but Five-Bamboo had
never imagined a four-year-old to behave with such maturity and was even
capable of…successfully plotting against Mr. Fei from the Capital City.

“Let’s deal with
this guy first,” Fan Xian suggested. With quite some effort he managed to flip
the assassin on the floor over and removed his cloth mask, revealing the true
identity of the assassin.

The assassin had a
very thin face and appeared to be quite old. The beard under his chin looked
like it was already turning gray, but for some unknown reason, the grayish color
was mixed with some spooky green, which made the beard look somewhat
disgusting.

“This is Mr. Fei, the Assistant Director of
the Empire Bureau of Investigation Third Division.” Five-Bamboo squatted down
slowly and reached for the assassin’s lower jaw. “He was considered to be one
of the top three poison masters in the entire world. He is skilled in deploying,
distinguishing, and detoxifying various poisons. A formidable one he is indeed,
yet you took care of him with a mere porcelain pillow. I wonder whether you were
really lucky or he was really unlucky.”

“He was really unlucky,” Fan Xian thought to
himself.

Although he was quite surprised by the fame
and high status of the man on the floor, he had to admit that the man was truly
unlucky to have met him, a monster with lives from two worlds in the disguise
of a young kid.

“Don’t touch him with your hands. What if
there’s poison on his body?” Fan Xian reminded the blind youngster Five-Bamboo.

Five-Bamboo did not stop his action, neither
did he explain. Fan Xian somehow got the feeling that this was his way of
making a statement: There is nothing in this world poisonous enough to kill him.

“Uncle, what do we do with him?” Fan Xian
asked with a bitter face, knitting his brow intensely.

He was not the natural socializer type.
However, in this world, the blind youngster was the first person he had ever
known and the only person he could trust wholeheartedly. Besides, he knew how
capable the youngster was in his Kung Fu skills, so he deliberately acted even
more lovable and respectful, never sparing any opportunity to address him as
uncle.

He glanced all over and finally fixed his
stare on the dagger. He ground his teeth hard and the idea of stabbing this Mr.
Fei to death soon occupied his entire mind.

“Your temperament is so different from Her
Ladyship. How can you be so cruel at such a young age? Who taught you?”

“I taught myself,” answered Fan Xian
respectfully, having no guts to offend the Kung Fu master, the only one he
could lay his trust in. “I know uncle has been staying in the grocery store all
these years so he can protect me. I also know that uncle only stayed away from
the Count’s Manor because he is afraid that my mother’s enemies might find me
here through him. That’s why I had to learn to be cruel myself.”

Five-Bamboo shook his head again and didn’t
speak.

Fan Xian could tell that his mother’s
servant plus Kung Fu master had grown suspicious of him, so he asked with a
cackle, “Uncle, what should we do now?”

His intention was obvious: maybe Uncle
Five-Bamboo should take care of the serious business such as killing. But
Five-Bamboo’s reply caught him by surprise.

“Young Master, you made a mistake. You hit
the wrong man.”

“What? Wrong man?”

Fan Xian froze in great shock. He slowly
turned toward the assassin lying on the floor and gazed at his blood-stained
face in disbelief.

“What’s done is done. No need to worry,”
Five-Bamboo declared calmly. “Mr. Fei is the Assistant Director of the Third
Division in the Empire Bureau of Investigation. But he also has a secret
identity… Actually he works for someone who works for your father. Therefore he
didn’t come to Port Danzhou to kill you. If he had really come to kill you, I
believe you would have died many times already, regardless of how skillful you
are.”

Now Fan Xian remembered. The assassin lying
on the floor seemed to have mentioned before that he was sent by Fan Xian’s
father, but….

……

……

“Damn, he looked totally like T-Bag[1].
Who’s gonna believe a dirty old man like him?”

For the past many years, Mr. Fei Jie[2]
had always stayed in the research institute of the Empire Bureau of
Investigation at the Capital City. Although with fine titles such as Master of
Poison and such, at the age over fifty, he was already kind of semi-retired. If
it had not been because of the request from an influential person asking him to
come to Port Danzhou to teach, and of course it was a request he did not have
the courage to reject, he would never have left the Capital City and made the
journey.

He had never expected to be greeted with two
heavy strikes on his head, which drew half a bowl of blood and almost ended his
old life, when he met his student for the first time.

He stared at the young boy in front of him
only to discover that the boy’s face had innocence and loveliness written all
over it. The two big eyes blinked again and again as if they carried a sense of
fear and shame. Such a lovable small face, together with the young boy’s
important status, successfully prevented him from blowing off his stomach full
of anger onto the little kid.

When he turned his head and spotted a
servant-like man, he finally found a vent for his anger.

However, the servant seemed to be even more
arrogant than him. Paying no attention to his demand, the man said coldly, “I
don’t recall the agreement I had with your superior included the part where you
play the role of a teacher.”

“Mr. Five?” Fei Jie opened his gloomy and
queer eyes wide and took a good glimpse of the servant-like man. Then he was
shocked. “Mr. Five, it’s you!”

Hearing the assassin calling himself Fei Jie[3]
after he regained his consciousness, Fan Xian found the entire matter truly
obscure.

[1]
Theodore "T-Bag" Bagwell, a fictional character from the American
television series Prison Break.

[2]
The name Fei Jie sounds like another Chinese word that means obscure or
unintelligible. Picking this name shows the author’s humor.